Learning with Unavailable Data: Generalized and Open Zero-Shot Learning

The field of visual object recognition has seen a significant progress in recent years thanks to the availability of large-scale annotated datasets. However, labelling a large amount of data is difficult and costly and can be simply infeasible for some classes due to the long-tail instances distribution problem. Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) is a framework that consider the case in which for some of the classes no labeled training examples are available to train the model. To solve the problem a multi-modal source of information, the class (semantic) embeddings, is exploited to extract knowledge from the available classes, the seen classes, and recognize novel categories for which the class embeddings is the only information available, namely, the unseen classes. To directly targeting the extreme imbalance in the data, in this thesis, we first propose a methodology to improve synthetic data generation for the unseen classes through their class embeddings. Second, we propose to generalize the Zero-Shot Learning framework towards a more competitive and real-world oriented scenario. Thus, we formalize the problem of Open Zero-Shot Learning as the problem of recognizing seen and unseen classes, as in ZSL, while also rejecting instances from unknown categories, for which neither visual data nor class embeddings are provided. Finally, we propose methodologies to not only generate unseen categories, but also the unknown ones

Transductive Zero-Shot Learning by Decoupled Feature Generation

In this paper, we address zero-shot learning (ZSL), the problem of recognizing categories for which no labeled visual data are available during training. We focus on the transductive setting, in which unlabelled visual data from unseen classes is available. State-of-the-art paradigms in ZSL typically exploit generative adversarial networks to synthesize visual features from semantic attributes. We posit that the main limitation of these approaches is to adopt a single model to face two problems: 1) generating realistic visual features, and 2) translating semantic attributes into visual cues. Differently, we propose to decouple such tasks, solving them separately. In particular, we train an unconditional generator to solely capture the complexity of the distribution of visual data and we subsequently pair it with a conditional generator devoted to enrich the prior knowledge of the data distribution with the semantic content of the class embeddings. We present a detailed ablation study to dissect the effect of our proposed decoupling approach, while demonstrating its superiority over the related stateof-the-art

Towards Open Zero-Shot Learning

In Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL), unseen categories (for which no visual data are available at training time) can be predicted by leveraging their class embeddings (e.g., a list of attributes describing them) together with a complementary pool of seen classes (paired with both visual data and class embeddings). Despite GZSL is arguably challenging, we posit that knowing in advance the class embeddings, especially for unseen categories, is an actual limit of the applicability of GZSL towards real-world scenarios. To relax this assumption, we propose Open Zero-Shot Learning (OZSL) as the problem of recognizing seen and unseen classes (as in GZSL) while also rejecting instances from unknown categories, for which neither visual data nor class embeddings are provided. We formalize the OZSL problem introducing evaluation protocols, error metrics and benchmark datasets. We also tackle the OZSL problem by proposing and evaluating the idea of performing unknown feature generation